By John Donovan
A tabloid-satirical rewrite of Chapter 3 of the John Donovan Shell archive: “Donovan vs Shell litigation.”
Source chapter: CHAPTER 3: Donovan vs Shell litigation, first published 13 November 2018 and later modified on 21 September 2021.
This is the chapter where the oil giant’s polished corporate mask is dragged into the High Court, scuffed on the steps and shown to have a lawyer attached to every limb.
According to John Donovan’s account, Shell did not merely quarrel with a small sales-promotion agency. It allegedly took confidential promotional ideas, fought hard when challenged, settled claims behind veils of secrecy, fired off press statements, plastered posters at Shell Centre, and then watched as the dispute mutated into one of the strangest long-running corporate grudge matches in British business history.
One of the world’s largest oil companies spent years trying not to look obsessed with a father-and-son website in Essex, while quietly producing internal briefings, issue notes, legal warnings, media lines, Wikipedia strategies, security chatter, source-hunting discussions and reputation-management scripts about exactly that father-and-son website.
ShellBot vs The Bots: The Spying We Can Prove
How Shell Accidentally Endorsed Its Loudest Critics — And Then Pretended It Didn’t Happen
